My 11th album is another collection of songs expressing my love for Texas, and provides many different views – some sublime, some silly – of this wild and wacky state. For this set, I changed my creative process. Late last year, after I released the two collections based on Carl Sandburg’s “The American Songbag” (“The California Songbag” and “Today’s American Songbag“), I found myself completely out of song lyrics for once. But in the fall and winter of 2023, I kept sitting down at night and composing music. Before I knew it, I had a bunch of riffs, beats, squeaks, squawks, and other musical fragments sitting on the shelf, yearning to become songs. So I assembled them into a playlist called “Random Grooves”, and listened to them while driving to town, while on the tractor, while burning brush, while walking the dog, and so on. Before I knew it, I began humming along, and this humming turned into words, which finally turned those lost and random grooves into “songs”. Most of these are merely observational ditties about the life I live these days – going to a Texas honky tonk when it was cold outside (“It’s On With the Show”)…going down to Brownsville with family to see the launch of mighty SpaceX Starship (“Elon, Take Me to Mars”)…and doing a short-lived male-only yoga class at the local studio (“Man Yoga” and “Man Yoga Remix”). One of the songs was written to commemorate my heroic and wholly unexpected turnip crop this winter (“The Turnip King of Gillespie County”). Two of best songs (IMHO) were inspired by a trip to West Texas in February for the annual Lone Star Poetry Gathering, “The Charge of the Cowboy Brigade” and “Road to Alpine”. It was this event in Alpine in 2021 that inspired my songwriting odyssey, which began a little over two years ago, and which to date has resulted in 93 completed songs and videos (OMG, I’m gonna’ blush!). …Finally, 7 songs – actually six, if you remove the highly gratuitous “Man Yoga Remix” – didn’t feel like enough for an album, so I tossed in “Craft Beer” at the end, a song I wrote for the local Craft Beer Festival back in the spring of 2023 – a song which is actually based on an earlier song called “Free Beer” I wrote while in college back in 1983. It’s never been included in an album, but it fit the “written based on things I’ve done in Texas” theme, and it is a peppy little number…so why not?? …Enjoy!
Music available on all the major streaming platforms.